2019-03-21T17:10:53ZLa fabrique d’un roi: les représentations de Louis XIV pendant son enfance et sa première jeunesse (1638-1661) dans la fiction littéraire en France de la Révolution à Alexandre Dumashttp://hdl.handle.net/10395/2069
La fabrique d’un roi: les représentations de Louis XIV pendant son enfance et sa première jeunesse (1638-1661) dans la fiction littéraire en France de la Révolution à Alexandre Dumas
This doctoral thesis proposes a study of fictional representations of the young dauphin and monarch Louis XIV in literary fiction in France from the Revolution to Alexandre Dumas. It specifically examines the portrayal of the future Sun King from his birth in 1638 to the commencement of his personal rule over France, following the death of Cardinal Mazarin on 9th March 1661. The main aim of this work is to understand how, in the French collective imagination, the figure of the dauphin and the young king evolved and was shaped by writers from the Revolution to 1854. This work identifies the various historical sources used by eighteenth and nineteenth-century novelists and playwrights and discusses the networks of influence that can be found within their works of fiction. Furthermore, by comparing successive fictional portraits of Louis as a child, teenager and young man with the historical facts, as established by the most renowned and authoritative seventeenth-century specialists, it sheds light on the aesthetic, political and ideological choices made by authors in the first half of the long nineteenth century.
2016-01-01T00:00:00ZDu rayonnement a l’eclipse, l’image mediatique et institutionnelle de casimir delavigne (1793-1843)http://hdl.handle.net/10395/2062
Du rayonnement a l’eclipse, l’image mediatique et institutionnelle de casimir delavigne (1793-1843)
This thesis, entitled « From radiance to eclipse, Casimir Delavigne’s media image », throws light on the career of this now-forgotten author. It completes and continues the research begun with the Colloque « Casimir Delavigne en son temps » (October 2011). It brings to the fore Delavigne’s fame and the impact that his work had on the French public from 1818 to 1843. This study questions the perception of Delavigne and his work by his relatives and contemporary artists, and by the press of his time and of the years following his death. Contemporary newspapers are analysed to illustrate or explain what Delavigne embodied for the French public at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The importance of this poet and playwright called for study given his disappearance from most literary and cultural histories from the twentieth century on. This study will propose hypotheses which will enable us to understand how an author who was so famous could so quickly be forgotten. Chapter 1 analyses the intensity of Delavigne’s radiance and identifies the historical and political context of his time ; Chapter 2 identifies the cultural context of the time of Delavigne in order to situate him as an artist and understand his importance to French and/or European literary heritage. Finally, chapter 3 consists of an analysis of the different types of reception of Delavigne’s work. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to analyse in detail how the work of the artist and criticism interact while also giving us an overall view of the author’s career.
2014-01-01T00:00:00ZSeeking transcendence: death, rebirth and transformation in the poetry of Renée Vivien (1877-1909)http://hdl.handle.net/10395/2044
Seeking transcendence: death, rebirth and transformation in the poetry of Renée Vivien (1877-1909)
Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn in England in 1877, moved to Paris at the age of twenty-one, where she pursued a literary career. Between 1901 and 1909, when she died at the age of thirty-two, Vivien published over thirty volumes of poetry, several short stories, translations of Sappho’s fragments, and a novel. Vivien chose to write exclusively in French, and her proficiency in that language is evidenced in her adherence to the strict conventions of French prosody. She was also a Classics scholar, and her knowledge of Greek facilitated her translation of Sappho into French. Vivien was a familiar member of the lesbian community of Paris, known as ‘Paris Tout Lesbos’. Paris at the turn of the century was known for its relaxed moral attitudes, and lesbianism was fashionable amongst the bohemian and literary circles of the Belle Époque. However, while these circles enjoyed sexual and cultural freedoms, an undercurrent of misogynistic and anti-feminist sentiment prevailed in French society. Such misogyny found expression in the medical discourse of the period and was articulated in literature and the popular press. Vivien’s poetry and prose, influenced by decadent and symbolist writing, challenged and subverted the androcentrism of these genres, confronting their anti-feminist/lesbian bias. Contemporaneous criticism of her work, focused on her image as a doomed and tragic lesbian, infamous for her hedonistic lifestyle, while modern critics pointed to her Decadent influences as an example of the anti-feminist aesthetic at play in her poetics. This thesis however aims through a close analysis of Vivien’s poetry to demonstrate the proto-feminist rhetoric of Vivien’s writing, and through the prism of the themes of death, rebirth and transformation, to reveal Vivien’s quest for transcendence.
2015-01-01T00:00:00ZLiberté, égalité, sororité : a study of the theatrical works of Olympe de Gouges 1748-1793http://hdl.handle.net/10395/1543
Liberté, égalité, sororité : a study of the theatrical works of Olympe de Gouges 1748-1793
Marie Olympe de Gouges was born Marie Gouze in Montauban, France on the seventh of May 1748. Widowed at the age of eighteen, she left her native Montauban accompanied by her young son to pursue a career as a writer in Paris in 1766. Changing her name to Olympe de Gouges, she forged a new identity for herself as a political pamphleteer, social activist, revolutionary sympathiser and playwright. Throughout her time as a writer she courted controversy for her proto-feminist principles and uncompromising advocacy of the cause of the abolitionists. De Gouges is principally remembered for her political and feminist writings, however she wished above all to be considered as a femme de lettres. This thesis involves a detailed study of the complete dramatic works of Olympe de Gouges, and aims to increase awareness of an important area of the playwright’s literary repertoire which is deserving of greater critical attention. Olympe de Gouges was found guilty of ‘pro-royalist’ sentiment by the revolutionaries and was thus executed on the third of November 1793. Altogether it is believed that she wrote around nineteen plays, twelve of which remain for posterity, and it is these plays which are examined in this thesis under the thematic headings of liberté, égalité and sororité.
2012-01-01T00:00:00Z